I quite like the inversion of account control in systems like bitcoin to put the user in charge, though this is not without problems. It would be nice if uk banking systems were not stuck in this odd world of accounts tied to physical branches by a sort code, or indeed if we just moved to global identifiers that were portable between banks and owned by a person, not a gov or bank.

Odd thing given the UK context - the major banks and many smaller let you pay someone with just their mobile number (it’s called PayM). Although given its bank payments, account numbers are far from archaic, and new things like confirmation payee help make the whole system more secure. Now it you want to talk about archaic, how about MT103 and friends?